FR: People familiar with our sound will know about our more atmospheric part that we use not only to underlay the songs with further landscapes but also some instrumental pieces we composed during our career. In the last album we collaborated with a Portuguese writer, creating both an album but also a book based upon, let’s say, the same energies and subjects. This writer (Jose Luis Peixoto) worked in the past with Rui making the dramaturgy for a contemporary dance performance, curiously named Antidote. The record contains an enhanced track with the multimedia book in English, and we made a kind of a soundtrack to it, that consisted in single out keyboard and atmospheric from the songs and to create something completely new out of it. We still use some of this passages live for intros and outros. Rui loved it so much that he commissioned us to work with the finest contemporary dance company in Portugal and one of the top ones in Europe. It was a challenging and rewarding work for all and allowed us to explore new things within our music which is always great for a band that does not want to freeze in a moment or direction.

CN: How old were you when you first started to write down your thoughts and feelings? How much longer after that was it before you began to organize those writings into what would formally be called poetry?

FR: My first real poem was finished when I was at my late 16’s and versed the pursuit of beauty and suicide. I made it specially for a psychology class where I put together a scientific approach to the taking of [one’s]own life, but also the emotional and human aspect of it, for me what really matters after all. I got an excellent grade and [from] my colleagues a punch in the stomach ? Before that I had a lot of disperse stuff, mainly pagan and satanic poetry together with teen heartbreak, funeral of love things, some of it that helped me even in some latter lyrics and poems, even though they were quite basic and sometimes juvenile.

CN: What was your first love, literature or music, and at what age?

FR: Music. Even though I read before joining school and liked some books already before listening to metal, it was metal bands like Metallica or Celtic Frost and Bathory that put things in perspective for me, pointing me [to]some references that I hold dear to this day like Baudelaire or Lovecraft. I was around 13 years old when I started listening heavily to metal, especially underground bands but also more established acts back then like the above mentioned, but also King Diamond or Onslaught.

CN: Did you sing along with pop music on the radio when you were a kid, like a natural singer, or did you take music or voice lessons in school?

FR: Like everyone I imitated radio, but one cannot take that into account as I never had an inclination towards music or art as a kid in the sense of becoming someone who could create it himself. No interesting parents listening [to] and having Black Sabbath records, no raw talent or child prodigy stories. I was more of a loner, different kid in the suburbs simply attracted by the refuge and fantasy in Metal music. I became the Moonspell singer because of my better lyrics, of my inventive power, but also because I couldn’t afford a drum kit.

CN: Poetry and writing are both such internal processes, how did you decide to make the leap to the external process of vocal performance, and how old were you when you made your first attempts?

FR: The internal/external borders for me diminished with time, and indeed, I always had trouble in accepting them and having to play by the rules of them. I tend to the interior, yes, but I hate the autistic form of a “pure spiritual” perspective of the world. I love to play football, for one. I have read Feuerbach on the beach. Well, that said, like I stated on the other question I became the Moonspell singer because of my words. Without them I will be no singer or performer or “sayer”. My first vocal attempts (to see if the decision was right) were on a previous guitar player from Morbid God (pre Moonspell 1989-1992) room on a Dictaphone. I told everyone to clear the room and started at that. I sounded like a cheap Quorthon (Bathory) with a terrible accent, and also like Barney (Benediction at that time) from Napalm Death. I was 15/16 years old and since then I have tried daily to make justice to my words starting from scratch, in the true sense of the word!

CN: I heard that you, like I, have a great affinity for the music of Leonard Cohen. When did you first discover his music? Also, describe what you love most about it.

FR: With the record I’m Your Man, around 1995, though I knew, obviously, of him before. I have to say that I picked much against his 70’s stuff with the honey-like voice and acoustic guitars until I started finding out that most of [his] emblematic songs date from that period. Then I could see behind the deep voice and that was a blessing. What I love about it is the delicacy of the sound through which his words (for me the essence of everything) surface. When he says “rivers dark I can sit by its margins,” when he says “if I am fire you must be wood” I can sense the victim and the vampire. That, I could only find in true special artists. Jim Morrison has it. Nick Cave as well. Johnny Cash idem. And all my fave bands as well. That effect I try, shamelessly, to copy.

FR: No, and I did the right decision. [The] Internet became more of a court, a Warfield, a competition of mistakes. There is no place for such a forum or a site. Those thoughts were kept and given indirectly so that only the right people can spring them up. I still share a lot of my thoughts, but that explicit form is out of question as a regular forum or site. I will have a blog though, on the new Moonspell.com

FR: It will take me a lifetime to explain that, I am sorry. Quorthon was in Portugal to promote Hammerheart. I followed him through all the in stores and got the privilege to talk with him and to help on a long interview for a fanzine done spontaneously. His humanity, his charm, his talent and his fire were disarming. The next day me and my friends were trying to be him and to have a band that could bring people to those emotions we felt by listening to Bathory and then from meeting a legend. To this day, the light of that morning and afternoon still illuminates everything I do.

CN: What is your favorite William Burroughs book, and why?

FR: The tricky questions start… Cities of the Red Night… because of its narrative, which I find breathtaking and absorbing like no other of his other great books. There I sound like a book reviewer now…

CN: Who is your favorite philosopher, and why?

FR: Who can answer this? For religious philosophy, Feuerbach; for the theory of knowledge, Kant; for Theodicy, Voltaire; from the pre-Socratic, Parmenides; contemporary, Cioran and Deleuze, impossible to go on, I sound pathetic, apologies…

CN: What is your favorite Edgar Allan Poe story, and why?

FR: Test? Ligeia and the poem The Raven--ghostlike, predator, poetic, very dark.

CN: What is your favorite writing by Umberto Eco, and why?

FR: Foucalt’s Pendulum for romance, as it is probably the most complete book I've ever read. It is compelling, credible and fantastically written. Dan Brown will cut his left testicle for two lines of this book. As for essay I love his American writings compiled in Europe in something called A Trip in the Unrealistic Quotidian, a bad name for a great book.

CN: What is your favorite H.P. Lovecraft story, and why?

FR: No!!! The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, his novel, still appeals very strongly to me. I love the theme of almost academic horror, mixing the dare to know human condition, with unseen, underground horrors, his own phobias. Lovecraft is a master. Short stories have to be The Color Out of Space; The Statement of Randolph Carter (creepy!) and The Shadow Over Innsmouth (not so short, yeah)

CN: I hear you, like I, also enjoy the wit of Oscar Wilde. What is your favorite Wilde play, and why?

FR: You heard it well. My favorite writings of Wilde are not his plays, but rather The Picture of Dorian Gray and his poetic prose like The Artist, The Doer of Good, The Disciple and so on. But also De Profundis is ravaging beautiful and a lot of his tales as well.

CN: With as much interest as you have in all things literary, as well as musical, do you foresee yourself writing not just a story, but a play or a rock opera to expound on the themes you compose with your words?

FR: Instead of pursuing that, I try to bring it to Moonspell and all that revolves around the band. My not so secret wish is to do a Moonspell’s Faust, and I guess I will make it someday.

FR: Many themes--but how we starve for unity--Memorial has, though, two things to retain that Moonspell has tried with the lyrics: both the particular and the universal are meant to be confused, as the matter that composes them is the same. That is, the story of a whole nation can be the story of an individual as well. I am as inspired by the great bloodsheds of history as I am by the young guy who cuts himself to make a blood oath with his girlfriend. In sequence we try that the mundane is also the mystic. "Blood Tells!" can be about the commitment of pain to a cause but can be about the kids who did that blood oath in the front seat of a car.

CN: Who did you have record the bass on the album this time around? (There is no one listed as bass player on the advance.)

FR: Waldemar Sorychta, the producer. But we have a steady live bass player now called Aires Pereira.